I wish theyâd made me memorise more
I had a good education, in a school system that had left behind the Bad Old Days, when teachers would hit you with a stick if you didnât rote-memorise endless facts. I was basically never required to memorise anything by rote. I was never threatened with violence either (at least, not by teachers)^1, and I think those two things may be related. I mean, you do basically need to threaten kids to get them to do rote memorisation - even they can see that thereâs no point to it. You can just look things up! Whatâs the use of stuffing your head full to bursting with a load of dry dusty facts?
Except, thatâs not how learning works, is it? The brain doesnât store knowledge like a hard drive, with a fixed amount of space that you can fill by learning, and if you learn too many things you have to erase other things to make room. The brain stores knowledge like a network, or a graph. You learn new things by connecting them to things you already know. New facts arenât just inserted into the brain in the next empty space, theyâre added to the existing structure, connected up to the surrounding knowledge.
If you come across a fact that has no connection to anything you know, your brain decides (usually correctly) that this fact is not useful to you - you canât do much with it. A beautiful old stone building you walk past every day has a plaque that says â1667â. Ok, so what? If you donât know anything else related to that, why would your brain bother to hang on to the number? Itâs meaningless. The only way to get that kind of fact to stay in your head, without connecting it to your existing knowledge, is sheer repetition ^2.
But if you do have some related knowledge, like, perhaps you know that the Great Fire of London was in 1666, well, now that plaque means something to you. This building was built the year after a huge fire burned down most of the city. I wonder what was there before? Then later, you read in passing that the plague killed like 20% of Londoners in 1665, and again this date might have been meaningless, but now it has things to connect to, so instead of sliding off it, you think âWow, what an incredibly shitty time to be in London. The vibe while they were putting up that building must have been wildâ. And so on. Each thing you know gives more places for new facts to stick to, and those new facts give you yet more possible connection points. The more you know, the easier it is to learn.
And once you know enough, you can connect up the different parts of your knowledge into one huge graph that makes most new facts you come across just automatically stick in your brain without trying. It is a joy to go through life with your understanding of the world effortlessly growing and deepening each day, in a virtuous cycle.
But before you can fly, you have to get up off the floor! If new facts hit your brain one at a time at random, each fact will probably find nothing to connect to, and just fall out again, leaving no purchase for the next one. A few will stick, so eventually you will start to build out from the basic things you started off knowing, but only very slowly, because youâve havenât got much surface area for new knowledge to stick to. Most of the information youâre exposed to will bounce off and be wasted.
What you really want, to get this feedback loop kick-started, is a kind of low density âscaffoldingâ of facts, that covers a wide area, so that new incoming facts of all kinds have a decent chance of finding something nearby to stick to. You could think of it like, you want to spread out a wide area of ânucleation pointsâ for new clusters of knowledge to start growing around.
For example, in order to have dates not just bounce off, you could learn the dates of major historical events: to get full coverage, you probably want to know the boundaries between periods - starts and ends of wars, reigns of the rulers, that kind of thing. To give information about places a chance to stick, you might want to just learn what countries there are, and maybe their capitals.
It doesnât make sense to go crazy with this, you only want a small fraction of your learning to be this kind of memorisation, since itâs a much harder way to learn any given fact than just slotting it into an existing structure in a way that makes sense. But if you use memorisation efficiently to build a framework skeleton to grow the rest of your knowledge on, it helps enormously.
The problem is, I didnât realise this kind of thing was a good idea until after my formal education was done, and to be honest I havenât been very successful at doing it on my own, without external motivation structures. And the worst thing is, now Iâve had years and years of valuable information just bouncing off my brain, where a lot of it might have stuck if Iâd only had the structure in place to catch it. I wish the value of memorisation was explained to me early enough to make the most of it.
Footnote 1: I dimly recall that one of my teachers (an older one when I was very young), still kept the stick in the classroom and would talk about how heâs not allowed to use it any more.
Footnote 2: (or mnemonic techniques, which basically all work by artificially inventing connections between the fact and things you already know).
